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0 By Rich Tee
No early waking this morning. I woke up at a reasonable hour, around 6.15am, which bucks the recent trend. I was knackered though after a week’s teaching. A late meeting at work on Wednesday and a parents evening until 7 pm on Thursday.
As a result, there has been no chance to go out running since Tuesday when I was in a foul mood. Running gives me the chance to level myself. I can get away from the more frantic and negative world that lurks around the darker corners of my mind.
Slow and Bound in a Fast and Racing World
Things have been building up. Tiredness also puts the boot in and makes reasoning and concentrating difficult. I have to plan very carefully how I teach the first lesson of the day. I can cope with the admin of tutor time but when it comes to teaching, particularly A Level first thing I am always wary.
Today, the world felt fast and racing, but I felt slow and bound. I teach but lose sentences in mid-construction, endpoints drop out of my head as I stumble to find some sort of satisfactory conclusion to what I started to say. I also lose words. I couldn’t spell ‘possess’ on the whiteboard and had to change it to ‘have’. These silly little errors increase the anxiety and self-doubt that I can still do this job.
I can feel the rising physical sensations of my hot face, burning ears, tingling in the legs and a dry mouth. The belly gurgles and churns. I want to go and leave but there’s nowhere to go. Professionalism and 20 odd years of classroom craft somehow get me through.
A Sense of Hollow Relief at Home Time
However, I didn’t feel vitriolic or defeated today, just flustered and rushed. No appetite either for food at lunchtime or for Friday. It doesn’t find me, yet I can sense it in others. I just get the emotional scrapings from the bottom of the jar, just enough to spread the thinnest layer to get the faintest of tastes. I drove home in the rain, with no sense of achievement or satisfaction, just a hollow relief that it’s done and an already growing dread that it will all still be there on Monday.
This evening, I had a rugby game to go and watch. I follow the usual routine of driving to the outskirts of the city and catching the Park & Ride bus to the ground; there is some comfort in the familiarity of that. My dad wasn’t there tonight; he’s babysitting for my sisters’ kids, so it all feels a bit lonely. I miss our ‘man time’, but I’m too man to say that to him.
Paper smiles
I wear my paper smile and laugh along at the banter of the people who I sit with. I know many of them as I have been a season ticket holder for 10 years, but I miss my dad. The team won the game comfortably, we got to cheer and clap and at least I got out of the house. It gives me the chance of company as my wife and daughters go out to Brownies on a Friday night. I am left to my own devices which used to be bliss but at the moment it just brings on the negative thoughts.
Night comes
Home by 10.30 pm and I am feeling calmer. I had the chance to catch up with my wife about the day. We then made plans with military precision for the busy weekend of activities ahead; 2 early get-ups as the kids need to be ferried to different activities in different counties at different times on both days. I just want to rest, but there’s no chance of that.
And so ends the day with another block of things to do, things not to forget, and not to miss. Will my brain let me sleep?
Reproduced with permission, originally posted here: runningismyantidepressant.wordpress.com
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